About this blog

Hi there! My name is Viktoria, and I'm a native Russian speaker, dividing her time between Saint-Petersburg, Omsk and Moscow. I love many things, and writing is amongst them. Not only I love writing in Russian, I want to learn how to write fiction literature in English. Also I plan to move to New Zealand on August 15 (2013) so English will soon become my main language of interaction. Therefore, this blog.

I'll try to write daily a little something about moving to New Zealand, and also about writing. Feel free to tell me when I make mistakes. I mean it! :-)

Friday, 14 August 2015

...I rediscovered this blog and decided to leave another blog post for posterity. :-)

So, the things that happened in 19 months...

My best boyfriend ever turned into the best husband ever. We traveled to Russia together where I introduced him to my friends and my family.

I got so good in performance testing, that I got myself promoted to senior.

I went through half of the courses for Data Science specialisation on coursera.org.

I've got learner's drivers license and started to learn how to drive.

We've traveled to Hobbiton and other places of LoTR value on North island. We've also been in Wellington few times and visited South island (Dunedin, Oamaru and surrounding area).

One of my articles have been published in the first issue of Testing Trapeza.

I've been a presenter on a bunch of local small-scale professional talks, and once - on a bigger once-a-year KWST testing conference.

We watched so many cool shows and movies together with my now husband!

I learned to cook new stuff, and also come to love farmers markets and some of the delicious stuff I've never tried before - for example indian mango chicken curry, my husband's pies and my own apple galette.

I started exercising with weights in fruitless hope to get arms like Michael Jordan. Heavenly, heavenly hands, man. *_*

...and what didn't happened.

I did not improve my English. I still don't understand many accents and have to ask people to say it again (and sometimes people have to ask me to repeat words). Don't think this is gonna change.

Haven't learned Japanese or piloting. Sad panda.

Haven't written any more of my book. Actually I gave up on it after all, since I didn't have much passion or time for it.

Tomorrow is exactly two years since I entered New Zealand for the very first time. It means that my resident visa needs to be changed to the permanent resident visa, otherwise I won't be let in New Zealand if I leave it. Next week I'll file documents to do just that. :-)

I can also say, two years later, that moving here was an excellent decision, it was worth every penny, every worry, every sad goodbye hug.
I still miss my bros, my friends and my family a lot. We keep in contact through google hangouts and letters, and we send each other parcels with goodies from time to time. But it's so not enough. Still, I don't regret anything. If I haven't moved here, I would've never met the love of my life.